Dispatch from Elsewhere: Adventures Away
Day 13: Macau
Hi friends! I’m writing today from the second cha chaan teng of the day. It’s a hot, hot, hot and humid day, and it’s pretty tough even walking around. My sister is at home resting while I’m out with my parents and their friends. Doing the rude thing of “texting” while present here, as this uncle really never stops yapping. He’s nice enough though. Him and his wife are a bit of a comedy duo where his wife is often playing the straight man.
This morning, Auntie A took us to a nostalgia-core restaurant, renovated with all sorts of really fun memorabilia.
This second restaurant is primarily just a place for my parents to hang out with their friends. It has strong AC and a roomy place to sit. We grab the most classic drinks: iced milk tea, honey lemon water, and lemon tea. I really want to make iced honey lemon water more often once I get home. I’m mostly just eavesdropping on their conversations about housing prices and their family roots. Macau is a small place, but those with deep roots feel increasingly rare. There is some stress around politics, but they’re more excited about FIFA than anything else. It’s charming to see all these 60 year olds with their collective excitement. They talk about their mutual friends too, and the different types of family structures among them. There are some who never married and some who never had kids. One thing I’ve always appreciated is that those folks have never been gossiped about—it’s always been a fact of life that people have made/forced to make different decisions in life.
I’ve also observed more diversity here than other parts of my trip—more wheelchair users, more visible disability, more children, more elderly folks, morr languages heard, more queer-appearing folks too. Likely, it’s just the areas we were in for Taiwan and Japan, but I still appreciate it.
A friend of mine has given me a few recommendations for places to visit, so hopefully I’ll be able to go on some fun adventures today with my sister after the sun sets.
Almost everything is about a ten minute walk, but in this heat, ten minutes feels like it takes years off your life. In the humidity, your body doesn’t sweat as much, so the heat sticks to your skin and lingers even after you’ve escaped into an AC room. Some people take three showers a day to wash off the mugginess. Unlike Taiwan, they really crank up the AC here, so at least there is temporary reprieve in most shops.
I escape my parents and their friends to brave the heat for a wee adventure. My sister was looking for card shops for B, so I take a wander. My Google Maps is unfortunately stuck in some kind of seizure mode, but Apple is accurate as hell. I cut through streets familiar and unfamiliar to end up in the Tap Saec area—I know these buildings well from October, when I was racing over almost daily to use the library wifi for work.
After a quick rest before I get heatstroke, I set out again on an adventure. On Maps, I notice a museum within walking distance and in an area I’d never been to, so I set off.
On the way, I pass by an old fishball place, a hole in the wall where folks order and walk around with oden-like food. They advertise old school mixed beef offal (I’m sad how gross that sounds in English) and there is a fridge full of different fish cakes, sausages, and veggies to dunk into the sauce/soup of your choice.
I then pass a cemetery that I’ve never seen before.
After a bit of zigging and zagging, I arrive!
The Communications Museum! I don’t really know what to expect. I’m just happy there is AC when I walk in. It’s pretty dark, with an empty reception desk and a dark, closed off gift shop. I ask the security guard if I need to pay and she laughs—I get the sense that it’s too scraggly of a museum to pay.
I buy myself a bottle of tea at the vending machine to rehydrate and see that the cafeteria is also dark and closed.
I start wandering once I feel a bit better and it is definitely a bit of a rinky dink museum despite its three floors. The first floor is dedicated to stamps. Specifically, stamps bearing images of zodiac animals. There is a replica of a dragon boat, a replica of a doorway of an old timey Chinese building, and a big traditional desk with a digital screen for you to try your hand at Chinese calligraphy.
It’s all a little kitschy, but I love it.
Upstairs is more stamps. There is a timeline of the establishment of mail service in Macau, a mini theatre where you can watch very old videos of people talking about stamps (I accidentally selected English dub and couldn’t turn it off, so I had to walk away after five minutes), and a big collection of stamps and post boxes from around the world.
I spend about two hours messing around the museum before getting kicked out at closing.
On the way home, I pick up some curry fishballs at the stall.
It’s 10 MOP for 10 and I’m the happiest camper in the world. The fishballs are so toothsome and despite picking mild, the sauce has such lovely flavour with the tiniest kick. The guy serving it is pretty done, but everyone is always a little done here, and I love that too. (That’s my people 😂)
For dinner, my sister and I head to classic HK fast food fare at Cafe de Coral (大家樂). It’s one of those quick and easy and relatively satisfying eats that I wish to hell we had. On offer today was 冬瓜盅 (winter melon soup served in carved winter melon), mango sago, and so much more variety. My sister got a tomato soup udon with pan fried chickens and I went for one of my fav dishes that I’ve been missing for a while—BBQ meats on rice with veg and soy sauce, the most quintessential worker man’s lunch. For 10 patacas more, you get some pseudo version of old fire soup, full of soybeans and mysterious veg. Whatever it was, it hit the freaking spot. The only thing better than soy chicken rice is soy chicken rice with good soup.
After dinner, we head over to Tap Seac to catch the card shop before they close. I show my sister the library and the lovely little alleyways.
The sun has went down, but it’s still muggy. The heat hits my sister extra hard, but she agrees to go on an adventure with me to see the Facade (the Ruins of St. Paul). Last time she visited, she was too overwhelmed by the crowds to see it. I told her it’s nicer at night, as there are less people and it’s lit up from behind. It’s the biggest symbol of Macau for whatever reason.
We end up walking up some pretty steep hills (I forgot Macau could be so hilly) and round the Facade from the back.
We end up getting pretty lost on the way back. We eventually hop on a bus—the busses are pretty frequent, air conditioned, and really quick. For a place only about an hours walk across, the bus situation is such a well-oiled machine. Then again, this is Asia.
It takes us an hour to get home, and we are pretty beat, but we made it!!
Time to regulate lmao
See y’all soon! Flor, out!